Paris and Wakefield Exhibitions Explore the Circus as Muse for Modern Art

Key facts

• The Circus: a Factory of Modern Art runs at the Musée de Montmartre, Paris, from 16 October to 14 February 2027.
• Marc Chagall: The Circus runs at the Hepworth Wakefield from 21 November to 25 April 2027.
• A rare loan from the Centre Pompidou of Fernand Léger’s Le Cirque Medrano (1918) will be a highlight of the Paris exhibition.
• The Circus Medrano, formerly Circus Fernando, was in Montmartre and was nicknamed the “Painters’ Circus” because many artists who went there had studios in the neighbourhood.
• Artists who depicted the circus include Léger, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Georges Rouault, Georges Seurat, Pierre Bonnard, Pablo Picasso and Marc Chagall.
• Chagall painted at the Cirque d’Hiver in Paris between 1926 and 1927, using a box offered by the art dealer Ambroise Vollard; the resulting gouaches led to a series of lithographs central to the Hepworth Wakefield show.
• The Hepworth Wakefield exhibition includes an important essay by Chagall, translated into English for the first time.
• Curator Eleanor Clayton says the circus offered Chagall a subject through which to process instability and change, resurfacing at key moments from the Russian Revolution to his return to Paris and again in the 1950s after his Second World War exile.